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Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Boom! WHOOSH! or I Wonder if That Garage is Heated...

Mary was more than a little concerned about Jon the other day.

Not that that is unusual. Mary’s a worrier, and if anybody can make you worry, it's Jon. Of course, Mary comes from a long line of worriers, and we’ve agreed, just between us, that there’s little she can do about it. Accordingly, when there’s worrying to do, we try to let Mary do it.

Makes her feel special.

So when Jon went out to the garage to turn its furnace on, and then she heard a BANG followed by a swift-moving WHOOSH, she didn’t know which way to run.

After the briefest of delays, she chose to run toward the garage.

“Jon! Jon!”

“I was frantic,” she tells me. “Am I going to find body parts? Car parts? Will it be bloody? Frankly, I didn’t think I was going to be equipped for it, if it was going to be bloody…”

She runs down the gently sloping backyard, calling his name, pulls up short just in front of the door. Not the one the car can pull into, but the door the humans walk in and out of.

“Jon! Dammit, Jon!”

“I’m ready to lose it,” she says to me. “I can’t decide if I should burst into tears or throw up or what.”

“Jon! Jon, answer me right this minute!”

“He’s not answering!” she says. “There’s no sound coming from inside the garage, but I can't bring myself to go in there! I’m yelling Jon! Jon! Answer me!”

She takes a breath. “And that,” she tells me, “is when he pops his head out the door. HULLO! he says!”

She shakes her head, smiling in that mystified way she has. Jon is her rock, her amusement, and her cross to bear.

“Pearl, there’s a great big patch of his beard missing, his eyes are blood-red, and his eyebrows look like they’re either melted or were originally part of one of those Mr. Potato Head games.” She smiles. “So I yell at him: Jon! Dammit, Jon, what the hell are you doing?”

She pauses.

“And?” I say.

“And nothing,” she says. “He just smiles at me, wants to know what’s for dinner.”

Our road garage furnace did that spontaneously, once. We ran out with the devil behind and called the fire department. They showed up in full fire gear, with the pumper, and climbed up to have a look see. There was a spider with a nest in the air intake valve. So by the time enough air got to the gas to complete combustion, KA-BOOM!